Soul care is critical to healthy Christian leadership, a lesson author Ruth Haley Barton has come to understand over the past 20 years as she’s studied, practiced and led others in the areas of spiritual formation. Haley Barton founded the Transforming Center 20 years ago as a ministry that creates space for God to strengthen the souls of leaders and transform communities through resources and retreats. Her latest book is Embracing Rhythms of Work and Rest: From Sabbath to Sabbatical and Back Again (IVP).
Here, she talks with Outreach about breaking the bonds that chain us to today’s frenzied culture by finding balance in work and rest. For Christian leaders, that means understanding the meaning of and choosing to prioritize Sabbath rest in their own lives.
Tell us about your personal journey toward Sabbath and rest.
I’m a pastor’s kid, so we practiced the Sabbath in my family, but in a very legalistic way. We were very busy on the Sabbath, and we didn’t get to do things we liked to do. We had to stay in our Sunday clothes, and we often hosted people from the church, so I didn’t experience the Sabbath to be a positive, delightful discipline in my early life. But in my early 40s I began to read really beautiful books about the Sabbath. I began to long for a different way of life that enabled me to rest one day a week.
Then I had a biking accident—I got run over by a van. As I emerged from that experience, I didn’t take any time off; I didn’t take any time to heal. A couple friends made comments to me that were really interesting. One of them said, “Ruth, you did just get hit by a car. You could take a day off.” And another said, “When are you going to learn that when you’re on a bike, you can’t take on a van?”
That was sort of symbolic of my whole way of taking on the world. I had been working hard ever since college, in God’s name, for Jesus, for the church. I don’t believe God caused that accident, but I do think God used it in my life, like knocking Paul off his horse, where I had to really pay attention to the physical limits of my body. I realized I needed to change how I was living to be more human.
What do we get wrong about our understanding of a Sabbath?
We think it’s only about resting. And it is about resting in God, but for a deeper reason: It’s a way of resisting life in our culture. It’s a way of resisting our bondage. The Sabbath was given to the people of Israel as a specific way for them to resist the Pharaoh and the drivenness they were experiencing by being governed. In a very profound way, Sabbath is about freedom. It’s about seeing where we are in bondage in our lives, and then practicing being free and not allowing ourselves to be driven by the culture around us, which doesn’t know anymore how to have any day that’s set apart. We are living our lives on God’s terms for us, and God, who knows us best, has given us the Sabbath as a gift.
The other thing we get wrong sometimes is we think Sabbath is the same thing as solitude, and it is not. Sabbath is a communal practice. It was practiced by the Jewish people in community. The intention on Sabbath is to be with those you love, to be in your community resting together and delighting together in God’s good gifts to you, and giving your best self to the people God has given you to in community.
If Sabbath is about liberating us from cultural bondage, then it’s going to look different for each of us.
Yes. And even how one defines work. I really love to be in the garden, but I don’t have time for gardening during the week. But on the Sabbath I will putz around in the garden and weed and really enjoy the beauty of the flowers and take it all in. To me, that’s not work, but for someone else whose work is growing vegetables on a farm, it is. We are ceasing our normal work in order to give ourselves to and delight ourselves in God’s good gifts.
When you went through your own journey of discovering what the Sabbath would look like in your life, it was not a linear progression. You encountered some resistance, right? How did you overcome that?
What I encourage is that we let ourselves fall in love with the Sabbath first. In the beginning, I was just reading books about Sabbath and allowing my heart to be stirred. I was getting in touch with my desire for a different way of life, and with how tired I really was. I wasn’t doing anything yet. And actually for a long time, I put Sabbath in the “too hard” file. I was on staff at a church, where Sunday was the busiest day. My husband is a banker, and his bank was open on Sundays. My kids were all athletes and their sports teams played. Sabbath was a really nice idea, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work in my own life. But eventually desire can deepen into desperation and a really deep kind of intentionality until you want it so badly you are willing to wrestle with the issues. And it was complicated, given all that I just described. So things needed to be dealt with at all those levels first.
Eventually, my husband’s job situation changed. And then we had to make some radical choices about sports as well, and we did. We just tried different things. It was a journey, and it is a journey, at different stages of life. The choices you make in this season may not fit the next season.
How can church life work against the Sabbath?
In Sabbath communities, which are communities that orient themselves in practicing Sabbath and supporting people in that practice, I suggest that a pastoral staff get the work of church done, and then rest. You’re not experiencing Sabbath when you’re leading worship, preaching, taking care of the nursery or ushering at the door. That’s work. So when that’s done at one o’clock, say, then the staff goes home and perhaps they have a Sabbath until noon or evening the next day. We’re all doing it together. The life of the community supports us being able to enter into a Sabbath.
What that means is churches need to change their priorities. You don’t schedule all the meetings and gatherings on Sundays. You leave the rest of Sunday open. No one goes back to the building the rest of that day, and you find other ways to get the congregation’s life accomplished. There has to be a day when we’re supported in this Sabbath practice. Otherwise it’s going to be too hard for anybody who is involved in the church.
That’s one of the hard realities I faced at a time when I wasn’t on staff at a church. We were just going to a church as a normal family, and I discovered that it wasn’t the secular culture that was keeping me from practicing a Sabbath. It was actually the church and its schedule. And so when we were a part of that church, there weren’t even two hours on a Sunday when we were all there together. Now I’m not saying that it has to be Sunday. But for many of us, Sunday is the only day where, as families, there is even any possibility of practicing a Sabbath. So if you can find another day, great. But for our family, Sunday was the only possibility to try to work with. When the church took that, for all their meetings and priorities, then we had nothing to work with to establish a Sabbath practice in our family. And that was part of the journey, too.
How else can we incorporate Sabbath rest into our lives?
Tilden Edwards talks about the fact that Sabbath is a quality of time that is restful and open and receptive. It’s not just a day. We can cultivate moments that have that quality to them, even in the midst of our everyday life. I could start every day with some moments that have a Sabbath quality to them, where I’m open, receptive and resting in God’s presence. There are moments throughout the day when we can build in Sabbath moments, like in between meetings, where we push back from the desk, take a minute to be quiet in God’s presence and just breathe. We rest ourselves in God for a moment.
Any parting thoughts for ministry leaders in need of true Sabbath rest?
People are very tired and longing for such an invitation. There’s a little quote about the Jewish practice of Sabbath by Hebrew essayist Ahad Ha’am: “More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” And that is my experience. It really isn’t so much about me keeping Sabbath. It’s more about the fact that Sabbath has kept me. The Sabbath has kept me intact. I was saved by rest.
Many of us are in need of salvation at that level. We are in need of being saved from our own drivenness, from life in our culture that keeps driving us to establish our identities around what we do. Many of us need to be saved in a very deep way, and Sabbath could be our salvation. I don’t mean to overstate it, except that I believe it’s true. I think of Isaiah 30:15, where God says, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”
When the Israelites were learning about Sabbath, they had to learn to trust that what they needed would be provided if they didn’t gather manna on the seventh day. They could hardly trust that the work of gathering they could do in six days could carry them through and be enough. Moses, as their senior leader, had to keep teaching them they weren’t supposed to gather on the seventh day.
I believe God is trying to say to us again today, that in returning to rest regularly, we shall be saved. And so I’d like to leave leaders with that to ponder: Where do you need to be saved right now? Where are you aware that you’re in danger? And how might Sabbath become, at least in part, your salvation?